~pperalta

Keeping with my tradition of sparse and outdated blog postings, I present my thoughts on TSE 2007!  For me, the following themes were prominent:

Spring is expanding the portfolio to cover more areas of enterprise development, in particular the integration and batch projects.  Most of the press coverage (including blogs) covers the trendy Ajaxification of the web (and there was no shortage of this at TSE either); but the core of the enterprise is (still) integration and batch processing.  The reception of these projects by attendees was positive and enthusiastic.

The trend of enterprise development is leaning away from generic monolithic J(2)EE application servers and towards more specialized solutions.  This was addressed at both Rod Johnson’s keynote and the keynote delivered by John Rymer, Vice President at Forrester Research.  This shift was made possible in large part by Spring and the infrastructure it provides (declarative AOP, TX management, etc.)  A number of surveys were referenced which indicate high rates of Tomcat adoption in the enterprise.  Deployments that require more than just a servlet container can easily take advantage of 3rd party add ons, such as the use of Coherence (and others) for clustering.

Speaking of clustering, attendees interested in clustering and scalability had a great selection of presentations to choose from.  Hal Hildebrand of Oracle delivered a well attended talk on using Spring, OSGi and Coherence to develop the next generation application server.  Billy Newport and Nati Shalom delivered presentations on IBM ObjectGrid and GigaSpaces, respectively.  Yours truly discussed Oracle Coherence and methods for integrating the data grid with Spring and data sources.  The data grid vendors participated in an extreme scalability BOF which included Rob Harrop and Wayne Lund. (Unfortunately Billy had to leave early and was not able to participate.)

Overall it was another great show; Jay Zimmerman and NFJS delivered, as always.

…you get your own bobble head doll!

This was the highlight of TSE keynote. Congrats Rod! Now we just need to get a bobble head doll of Cameron…

Next weeks marks the beginning of The Spring Experience 2007. I am fortunate this year to not only get the opportunity to attend but also to have a speaking slot. I will be talking about using Oracle Coherence to scale Spring applications and integration points between Coherence and Spring. I am looking forward to giving the presentation, as well as interacting and learning from some of the best talent in the industry.

Last week a story was published on Information Week about Overstock.com and its performance on Cyber Monday. According to the article, one of the factors of their success was the use of Coherence as a caching layer. As an Oracle/Tangosol employee, obviously it is great to see the software used successfully in this and so many other important deployments. However, there were other items that caught my eye:

“About a year ago, Byrne and Overstock.com CTO Sam Peterson decided to rehaul the Web site around the concept of “agile development,” where small teams of developers would work with each business unit to develop and improve functionality and roll out new releases as needed. “

and

“‘We had three developers on staff three or four years ago; now we have over 40 developers,” Byrne said in an interview. “We found it’s worth it to pay up for more expensive and more serious people.’”

This story demonstrates how the right mix of developers, process, and technology can produce the right results. Hopefully more businesses will come to understand this and therefore invest in their technical personnel.